Category Archives: Charts

In many situations you collect data every day (sales figures, stock prices etc.) for weeks, months and years, while all you want to show in the chart is the last week or two. I’ve seen many people spending a lot of time updating the chart manually every day, so here I will show you how you can make a dynamic chart that always shows the last 7 days. Of course, you can use the same technique for any number of days, weeks or months.

Have you ever seen a line chart in Excel that’s suddenly dropping to zero? Here’s why it happens and what to do about it:

Let’s say you have a table where you enter new sales figures every day, and a line chart connected to it. The sales figures for the last few days in the table have not yet been filled out, so the last values for the y-axis are zero. This is what the line chart could look like:

Why do Excel charts usually look so ugly? Ok, they look a lot better in newer versions of Excel than they did before, but you still need to make a few changes if you want them to look good enough for a presentation.

These are the 5 things you need to do to make your Excel chart look professional: